A Warm Heart in Winter

by J. R. Ward

  “He doesn’t see us.” Z leaned in, the ambient light of the city making the black daggers holstered over his heart gleam. “You honestly aren’t worried about him?”

  “Of course I am. But we lived apart from each other for the last week, even as we were sleeping in the same room. We just got back on track. I don’t want to mess that up.”

  “If you check on him because you’re concerned for his welfare, do you really think he’ll hold that against you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Blay let his head fall back on his spine and looked to the sky. But if he was expecting any help with the decision from the muted show of stars, he didn’t get any. Besides, there was only one thing to do, wasn’t there.

  So, yup, he told Z the address, and one after the other, they dematerialized to the street in question. As they re-formed on a sidewalk that had been snowblown with ruler-worthy precision, Blay had chills—and not from the below-zero temperature.

  “It’s okay, son,” Z murmured. “Let’s just gather the breath, shall we.”

  It was a long moment before Blay could speak.

  “The last time I was here… was the night I identified the bodies.” As he turned and faced the estate’s driveway, the treads of his shitkickers squeaked on the snow pack—and with every blink of his eyes, the past came back with greater and greater clarity. “The lessers had slaughtered everyone in the house, staff included. I found his mahmen and his sister upstairs in a maid’s closet. They were slumped together in each other’s arms. They had been shot in the head.”

  “I’m sorry you had to see that, son.”

  “His father…” Blay cleared his throat. “I found his father out in the back garden. He’d tried to run to escape, but he’d been wounded. There was a trail of blood leading to where his body was. His throat was sliced so deep that he was basically decapitated, and he had gunshot wounds all over him.”

  Blay could still remember the male’s fine suit. Full of holes that smelled like lead, and stained with fresh red blood.

  “And where was Luchas.”

  “In his room. Over by his bureau.” Blay winced. “That’s where he told Qhuinn he’d hidden whatever it is. He’d probably been stashing it there when they got to him.”

  “How’d they kill him.”

  “Does it matter now?”

  “Finish the story, son. It’s why you started talking. You need to get this out. It’s the other reason you’ve come here. You want to see your part in the story—and your identifying and burying the bodies is where so much of Luchas’s narrative began.”

  Blay looked over at Z, a pit in his stomach. “Does that mean it’s my fault?”

  “You didn’t do the killing on either night, son.”

  “It feels like I did.”

  The Brother shook his head. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not that powerful. Some things are inevitable, both for joy and for pain. Be honest. If Luchas was so weak, don’t you think he would have done what he did last week a while ago? He was a strong male of worth. In the end, though, the injuries were too much—and I’m not just talking about the physical ones. You weren’t responsible for his pain, and the choice was one he made for himself.”

  Blay took a deep breath. “But what if I got him to thinking?”

  “About what?”

  “Where he was in his life. Whether he was ever going to get out of the clinic. If he had a future other than swimming in that pool, getting treatments for pain, and having hunks of him cut off to control infection?”

  “You don’t think all of that shit wasn’t on his mind every second of every night and all the hours of each day? You really think that his reality was some kind of revelation he was avoiding—up until you said two words to him and all of a sudden he was like, ‘Fuck me, I’m here and it’s awful’?”

  “I told him Qhuinn had been promoted to private guard in the Brotherhood.”

  “So?”

  “What do you mean, so. It clearly changed something for him.”

  At that moment, an SUV drove past, its heavy tires carving a fresh track in the snow pack. Of course it was a Range Rover. Instinctually, Blay put his hand on the butt of his holstered gun as he tracked its velocity, direction, and driver.

  After it had gone by, the icy, too-bright headlights fading, the glowing red brake lamps disappearing, Z shrugged.

  “Forgive me for being harsh here, son, but you need to get real. Just because you fear something doesn’t mean it’s true. Just because you’re terrified you’re responsible doesn’t make you the driver of any of this. I want you to at least try on for size the idea that you were not responsible for any of it. Not the damage done to him by the Omega and Lash, not the success and good fortune enjoyed by his brother. It’s not about you, and yes, I know that can be a very hard lesson. I’m just hoping you learn it sooner rather than later because it’s clearly eating you up.”

  “But I am responsible. We all are. He was part of our community and he was suffering. We all should have done a better job supporting him.”

  “You may be right about that. And I am honestly and deeply sorry for everything he went through, everything that made his final choice seem like the only way forward for him. But I think you need to forgive yourself for what you perceive your role was in the whole thing. I have been where Luchas was. I’ve walked that path of crushing pain and hopelessness. I can assure you, when I was there? I wasn’t thinking about anyone else. My own suffering was all I knew.”

  Blay looked up the drive. The mansion was barely visible from the street, but that was the way of the neighborhood, everything set back behind majestic gates, all kinds of land around the sprawling homes.

  “Stop bargaining with what happened, son. You’re at a negotiation table with no one sitting across from you. All you’re doing is arguing against yourself—and a set of circumstances that are not going to change, no matter how much torture you put yourself through.”

  With a harsh laugh, Blay shook his head. “That’s exactly what I’m doing. How do you know me so well.”

  “Because my brother lived it—you’re on the Phury side of things. He blamed himself for years for everything that happened to me. He carried that burden around for a century and it nearly killed him. Does Qhuinn blame you?”

  “He says he doesn’t.”

  “And you don’t believe him?”

  “I’m not sure he knows where he is about anything right now.”

  “You think he’s that stupid?”

  “I think he’s in that much pain.”

  Z exhaled a curse, his breath a white cloud in the cold. “I hate this for him and I hate this for you. And when it comes to the pair of you, I can’t tell you what to do or what to believe, but personally, I’ll vote for true love—and that’s what binds you together. Qhuinn might be confused about a lot of things right now, but the one thing I’m damn sure he’s certain about?”

  When the Brother didn’t continue, Blay looked across at him.

  Like he’d been waiting for the eye contact, Z continued, “What I’m really damn sure he’s certain about? The quality and the kindness of the male he’s mated to.”

  Z extended the forefinger of his dagger hand to Blay’s chest. “Your heart was, and is, always true. And the people around you have faith in your goodness. So if you can’t believe in yourself? How about you take our opinion as fact, son—and let the burden you don’t actually carry go.”

  Blay’s head dropped.

  Just as he thought he was going to lose his balance, Zsadist, the Brother who never touched anyone, stepped in and held him close. As Blay grabbed on to the male, he looked over that massive shoulder to what he could see of the mansion. It was only the gabled roof with its lightning rods, the silhouette like a crown on top of the rolling estate’s royal head.

  He pictured his mate inside that house, going upstairs to find the thing Luchas had stashed right before he was killed.

  For what turned out to
be only the first time.

  Abruptly, Blay frowned and pulled back. “You switched partners tonight, didn’t you. So you could be with me. I was supposed to be paired with Payne.”

  The Brother shrugged. “I had a feeling you and your boy might need a helping hand. Or at the very least, a sidebar with someone who’s had some personal experience with these things.”

  Blay glanced at the roof again. “Thank you,” he said in a small voice.

  “I’m just paying back that one airplane ride Qhuinn gave me.”

  “Which one—oh, right. Jesus.”

  “Yup. You bet your ass there was some praying going on that night.”

  “You know,” Blay said as they started walking toward the gate, “I didn’t realize Qhuinn could fly an airplane.”

  After they dematerialized through the slats of the iron work, Zsadist said dryly, “I think it came as a surprise to him, too.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Up on the second floor of his parents’ transformed house, Qhuinn stared down at the little girl standing in front of him. Then he looked back into the dim bedroom.

  “Yeah, I’m allowed to be here,” he said in answer to her question. “ ’Cuz this is the house I grew up in. Like you’re doing now.”

  “Oh, okay. So you’re going to hurt us? You look a little scary. You’re really tall.”

  “No, honey. I’m not going to hurt you or your family.”

  “That’s good.”

  He’d fix her memories in a second. Right now, he was too freaked at the idea he might be fucked on his mission because of these humans’ need to change every single frickin’ thing about the house they’d bought.

  Leaving her be, he walked into the room, the echo of his boots loud on the hard marble floor. Currently, there was a bed over there, a desk opposite it, and then something weird across in the corner—a sofa, maybe? In his mind, he tried to remember things as they had been when Luchas had lived in the suite. The bureau had been centered between the two windows that overlooked the garden. Yes, that was where it had been.

  Going over, he knelt down and passed his hand over the smooth stone tile. He wasn’t well versed in construction, but it didn’t take a Bob Vila to know that if you wanted to put in marble flooring, you had to have a clean slate to work with. So those floorboards, and whatever had been tucked under them, were long gone.

  Oh, Luchas, he thought. Why didn’t you tell me what you needed me to do after I got the damn stuff? Why didn’t you put it in the letter so I had something else to go on—

  “What are you looking for, mister?”

  Ignoring the kid, he tried to figure out his options. He supposed he could go get a hammer and bust up this section of the tile… at which point he’d have Ron, the second wife, and at least two kids as a peanut gallery—

  “What’re you doing, Mouse?”

  Qhuinn closed his eyes. Great. Ronnie was back.

  “There’s this man in the house, Daddy.”

  “Oh, hi,” Ron said as he came into the doorway. “How you doing?”

  Like the pair of them were old friends.

  As Qhuinn shot a glare over his shoulder, he was ready to fuck them both off—and yet, as he saw the pair standing together, both dark-haired, the little girl leaning onto her sire’s leg, the father with his hand on her shoulder, he knew he couldn’t curse at them.

  He pictured him and Lyric doing the same thing, like, five years from now.

  Well, okay, fine. If somebody broke into the mansion, they’d be vaporized before there was any conversation with anybody. But still.

  “Hi, Ron.” Qhuinn let himself fall on his ass. “How are we doing?”

  He asked this on a reflex because he knew exactly how everyone was: He’d lost his shot at helping Luchas, Ron had a vampire in his house, and little Cindy-Lou Who, or whatever her name was, was recording this whole thing like her brain was the Rosetta Stone.

  “Are you looking for those old letters?” Ron asked.

  Qhuinn frowned. “What?”

  “The stuff in the floor? When we did this room over, we found this bundle of, like, envelopes.”

  Before Qhuinn had a conscious thought, he was up on his feet. “You kept it? Them, I mean.”

  “Yeah, I thought maybe someone would ask about whatever they are. But the guy I bought this place from—well, you, actually—see, I didn’t ever meet you, and when I tried to get in touch through the real estate agent, they couldn’t find your representative.”

  Fritz was a very good proxy, wasn’t he. Present when he had to be, invisible to humans of all kinds when the legal work was done.

  Ron rubbed his side like he had an itch on his liver. “They said this house had been in your family for two hundred years. Is that true?”

  “Hey, Ron, I’d love to keep chatting, but I don’t suppose you could grab those letters for me?”

  The kid looked up at her dad. “This was his older brother’s room.”

  “Just like you and Tommy.”

  “Yup.”

  “Come on,” Ron said to Qhuinn. “They’re in the safe in my office.”

  The three of them walked down the hall together, Ron making a shhhh with his forefinger to his lips as they passed the master suite, the universal sign for Don’t wake up the wife.

  Yuppers, Qhuinn agreed. That shit was mission critical.

  Ron’s office was in what had been a formal guestroom, and there were all kinds of high-tech minimal on the Lucite desk, the computer nothing but a keyboard and a screen thin as a human hair.

  “The safe is over here.” Ron went across to the opposite wall—which appeared to be covered with leather panels the color of Rhamp’s diaper after the kid ate a boatload of peas. “It’s hidden.”

  Ron flapped his hand around. Frowned. Did some more flapping. “Maybe it’s over here.”

  After a couple of tries to get some sort of hidden reader to recognize his palm print, Ron managed to locate that which had been so successfully camo’d that he couldn’t find the goddamn thing: A part of the wall slid back, exposing a black-and-gray safe.

  After some beeping on a little button pad on the front, there was a shhhscht, and then Ron was all about the open-sesame. For a split second, Qhuinn panicked that there would be a mysterious disappearance. Some kind of whoopsy. A spontaneous combustion in front of his very eyes—

  “Here they are.”

  Ron held out a bulky manila envelope. As Qhuinn took it and cracked the flap, he felt like his whole body was shaking.

  “You okay?” Ron asked.

  Inside, there were a couple of sealed letters, a sheet of paper, and something wrapped in tissue paper.

  “Daddy? There are two people out in the backyard.”

  Qhuinn looked up. The mini-Ron in the Disney nightgown was standing at one of the windows that faced the garden. Her hand was up on the glass, her face worried.

  Before her father could get involved, Qhuinn froze the guy where he stood and then went over to check the view.

  Out on the lawn, where Qhuinn’s mahmen’s rose garden had been, two tall figures dressed in black were standing together, facing the house. Even though the moon was partially covered with a bank of passing clouds, it was obvious that one had red hair and the other had almost no hair at all.

  Well, at least they weren’t trying to hide themselves.

  “It’s okay.” He patted the little girl’s shoulder. “They’re with me.”

  She looked up at him. “Are you real? Or am I dreaming?”

  “I’m kind of real.” Qhuinn turned to Ron and held up the manila envelope. “Thanks for this.”

  The man nodded. “Something told me I should hang on to it. Was it your brother’s?”

  “Yeah, it was.” Qhuinn held the bundle to his chest. “You’re a good guy, Ron.”

  “Thanks. You, too.”

  Who the fuck knew what they were saying to each other. “Did you deal with the feeds from the security cameras?”

&nbs
p; “Yup, they’re all gone.”

  “Good job. I gotta go now. You take your little girl back to her room.”

  “Okay. Bye. Come on, Mouse.”

  As Ron held his arm out, his daughter went readily, and as she was led away, the little girl looked over her shoulder.

  That was Qhuinn’s chance to strike her memories—and he almost did. But her father would take care of framing things, and there was no reason to risk scrambling her for life when this would all just be relegated to the huh, weird bucket in her brain.

  You had to be careful with children’s minds.

  When he heard a couple of doors shut, he glanced around one more time. The manila envelope crinkled in his hands as he switched his hold on it, and then he closed his eyes. He desperately wanted to look through the things his brother had left behind now, but here was not the place.

  A moment later, he dematerialized down to the back lawn.

  As he re-formed, he faced the pair of interlopers.

  Z didn’t seem bothered by the getting caught. Blay rubbed his eyebrow with his thumb, like he was trying to think of something to say.

  Meeting the two males in the eye, Qhuinn did the only thing that came to mind.

  He hugged them both at the same time. Rushing forward, he threw his arms around them and dragged them in close. As his embrace was returned, he closed his eyes briefly, and heard himself speak a truth that surprised himself.

  “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  Before things got too gooey with the emotional bullshit, he stepped back and held up the manila envelope. Clearing his throat, he announced, “And I got what Luchas left. Let’s go back and see what it is.”

  “I’m so glad,” Blay said as he appeared to brush away tears. “I was worried something might have happened to whatever it is.”

  “Something did.” Qhuinn put up his palm. “Lot of marble floors in that place now—well, it’s a long story. Let’s ghost.”

  Blay and Z left first. And just before Qhuinn dematerialized along with them, he glanced back at the house. He knew in his heart that he was never returning here and he was surprised at how numb he was to that reality. Then again, it wasn’t his home anymore—if it ever had been in the warm sense of that word. Yet so much of what shaped him had happened here, and even though none of it had been pleasant, his origin story was forever etched in each of the rooms and in all of the acreage.